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Wordspinner 2.0 for WP 3.0!

I’d like to say thank you to the thousands of people who have downloaded and used WordSpinner. As my first ever WordPress Plugin it means a lot to me that so many people find it as valuable as I do. With the release of WordPress 3.0 earlier this week, I thought something special was in order. So, without further adieu, I give you WordSpinner v2.0 – now fully capable of handeling a pretty much infinite number of levels of spinners (providing you use the correct syntax).

Enjoy, and please send me feedback or comment on this article if you have questions.

Happy Spinnin’

Love, Kythin.

EDIT: Thanks to XWipeoutX for the performance improvement tweaks in 2.1, you rock!

UPDATE FOR WP 3.1.3: Now with shortcodes! You can now use shortcodes in your template files to spin extra things like Titles, Comments, and anything else you like! Details and syntax are on the settings page when you install / update the plugin.

I think most blog owners wouldn’t want to educate the commenters on how to write spinners, though come to think of it then the blog owners themselves could write spinners in their replies to comments. Hmm, might check into it if anyone else wants it done too!

First off, I’m digging the plug-in. Here is a little on how I am using it and what I feel it’s missing.

How I’m Using it.

I am importing an rss feed using “WP RSS Poster”. The content is all spun already. When imported into the blog I am using your great plug-in “WordSpinner”.

It would be nice to have these features as well as options included in the plugin.

1. Option to just have the content spun once. I am syndicating my own content to several blogs in the same niche. I am spinning the content so each article is more unique on each blog. I don’t care about the content being static once it’s already spun.

2. Option to Spin Titles. Again I just want a unique title that is static and do not want it changed. Currently the spinner does not spin titles.

Great suggestions, the main reason I haven’t added an option to spin the content only once is that it’s basically a whole rewrite of the system using different WP hooks. Plus, then the plugin directly impacts on the content of your posts which I don’t want to ever do (it just asks for trouble if there’s ever a bug that kills a thousand site’s content when they do an upgrade). The solution to that is to save the pre-spun data somewhere, which adds a whole new can of worms to the mix as it can potentially then increase the size of your blog’s database exponentially.

I’ve got a theory about generating some kind of algorithm to essentually negate the randomiser, but it’s honestly a low priority because it’s a lot of work that’s more or less outside the scope of the project.

Sorry for the late reply, working on a new version now and going through all my emails/comments/whatever for upgrades. Unfortunately this one I don’t think it fixable but I have at least figured out the ‘why’!

The header meta ‘description’ tag is usually handled by the theme you have installed, and there’s not really any easy access wordpress functions I can use to change just the description. I can change the Title though, so some other users will be happy with the soon to be released upgrade, but the description is a different story. Another spanner in this issue is that every different SEO plugin out there is also using it’s own different way to access and change the description, so even if I could change it there’s little chance that it would work for most people given that a lot of people use SEO plugins (I always do).

Now, if you’re not using an SEO plugin, a new change I’ll release soon might help. If your theme uses the excerpt, then you will soon be able to write spinners in the excerpt and everything will be hunky dory.

Anyway, if you want to fix this issue and you ARE using an SEO plugin, on the post you need to manually set the Description yourself without using any spinners.

At the moment, no, that’s not possible. I’m currently working on a new version and have titles spinning but not the permalinks. Not sure if it will make it into this version but I am investigating anyway 🙂

For those of us that know absolutely nothing about ‘spinning’, do you think you could post some examples of how to use it please?
The syntax looks simple enough, but its use is predicated on knowing the meaning of the identifiers.

Is there any chance you will support the “|”? This is the standard seperater for spinning and it’s actually getting really annoying to not use it, since I can’t use any spun articles I use for SEO on my website without time consuming changes.

@ Gerald: This caching occurs if you have identical content in 2 spinners and have turned on the ‘one spin per user session’ setting. Turn off the setting to get the two spinners to generate independently random outputs.